Navy to practice spaceship recovery off San Diego

A Navy warship will place an experimental space capsule in the ocean off San Diego and later retrieve it as part of an exercise to help NASA develop a safe way to recover Orion, a planned spacecraft whose astronauts will return to Earth by parachuting into the sea.

The exercise will occur in late February near San Clemente Island, where the amphibious warship San Diego will put the Orion prototype into a cradle then float it out of its well deck. The 20,000-pound capsule will be allowed to bob in the ocean for hours before it is recovered by the San Diego.

Mike Generale, a NASA executive who'll oversee the test, says the capsule will be placed in increasingly rough seas, giving the space agency and Navy experience with the sort of ocean recoveries that were conducted during Project Apollo during the late 1960s and early '70s. Orion greatly resembles the Apollo capsules.

Earlier this year, the Navy did a limited test recovery of an Orion prototype in the harbor at Norfolk, Virginia, off the warship Arlington. US Navy

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Earlier this year, the Navy did a limited test recovery of an Orion prototype in the harbor at Norfolk, Virginia, off the warship Arlington.

The upcoming tests are represent a dress rehearsal for next year's launch of an unmanned Orion, which will orbit Earth, then parachute into the ocean off Baja California, about 600 miles south-southwest of San Diego.

NASA is still working out the specifics of the Orion program. But the space agency says the first manned launch could occur in 2020. NASA is considering missions to the moon, to an asteroid, and eventually to Mars. Orion will be designed to hold from 4-6 astronauts. The shuttle could hold up to seven.

Generale said NASA is returning to the days when astronauts parachuted to Earth in a capsule "because physics dictates that this is the most efficient way to bring a crew back into the atmosphere from deep space. We know from Apollo that this shape does the job. Orion is going to build on both the lessons of Apollo and the space shuttle programs."